The Year And The Vineyard review

Burley to the future

An Italian anti-fascist (Andrea Calabrese) is en route to the Spanish Civil War… when a hole in time transports him to the present day. Yet the locals are strangely unperturbed; in this sleepy, pious village, they assume he’s an angel. Similarly, Jonathan Cenzual Burley’s laboured magic-realist fable isn’t interested in mining the possibilities of time travel drama.

Instead, the film wanders aimlessly through a whimsical patchwork of slapstick, romance and pretty scenery, while Burley batters his one idea – that in rural Spain, little has changed since the war – into submission. A lost opportunity, and the mercifully brief running time suggests the filmmakers know it.